Wuhan seafood market may not be source of novel virus spreading globally • Hacker News Board

Re: Wuhan seafood market may not be source of novel virus spreading globally

#91

Post by agumonkey » Fri, Jan 31, 2020, 11:56 PM UTC

izzydata wrote: post #42

Fomite wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- Every laboratory exposure-related outbreak I've encountered has been trivially easy to trace back to that event. - Most high-end virology labs are doing research on human to human transmission of corona viruses. They're a major emerging type of virus we don't understand, and a Chinese lab working on them is even less surprising. - If this was a bioweapon, it sucks .

Originating from a lab doesn't necessarily mean it is a weapon. Only that they have poor sterilization or something.

yeah close proxmity changes everything, mistakes are not impossible. ..

Re: Wuhan seafood market may not be source of novel virus spreading globally

#92

Post by CriticalCathed » Fri, Jan 31, 2020, 11:57 PM UTC

yurlungur wrote: post #52

The market resides in the heart of the city so it could be that there was some other route of transmission through carriers without symptoms, animals etc. To claim that this came from a lab certain requires more evidence than its mere existence. The whole RNA sequence is available online and so far no expert to my knowledge has claimed it looks synthetic.

Well, there's one pre-print paper that goes as far as saying that because some segments of the RNA resemble, closely, parts of HIV, that those may have been inserted by human efforts. Of course, there's been a lot of pushback to this assertion; detractor say that this "inserted segment" actually shows up in all kinds of things and it also being in HIV is not significant here.

For the article and the pushback, see this link and its comments:

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.30.927871v1

Re: Wuhan seafood market may not be source of novel virus spreading globally

#93

Post by erokar » Fri, Jan 31, 2020, 11:58 PM UTC

yurlungur wrote: post #52

The market resides in the heart of the city so it could be that there was some other route of transmission through carriers without symptoms, animals etc. To claim that this came from a lab certain requires more evidence than its mere existence. The whole RNA sequence is available online and so far no expert to my knowledge has claimed it looks synthetic.

Parts of the HIV virus have been identified in it: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.30.927871v1....

"Our analysis of the spike glycoprotein of 2019-nCoV revealed several interesting findings: First, we identified 4 unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV spike glycoprotein that are not present in any other coronavirus reported till date. To our surprise, all the 4 inserts in the 2019-nCoV mapped to It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license. preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. bioRxiv preprint first posted online Jan. 31, 2020; doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/2020.01.30.927871. The copyright holder for this short segments of amino acids in the HIV-1 gp120 and Gag among all annotated virus proteins in the NCBI database. This uncanny similarity of novel inserts in the 2019- nCoV spike protein to HIV-1 gp120 and Gag is unlikely to be fortuitous."

https://mobile.twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/122330594672370...

Re: Wuhan seafood market may not be source of novel virus spreading globally

#94

Post by drcode » Sat, Feb 01, 2020, 12:02 AM UTC

erokar wrote: post #93

yurlungur wrote: post #52

The market resides in the heart of the city so it could be that there was some other route of transmission through carriers without symptoms, animals etc. To claim that this came from a lab certain requires more evidence than its mere existence. The whole RNA sequence is available online and so far no expert to my knowledge has claimed it looks synthetic.

Parts of the HIV virus have been identified in it: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.30.927871v1.... "Our analysis of the spike glycoprotein of 2019-nCoV revealed several interesting findings: First, we identified 4 unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV spike glycoprotein that are not present in any other coronavirus reported till date. To our surprise, all the 4 inserts in the 2019-nCoV mapped to It is made…

Other people have written about the HIV-lookalike segment mentioned in that paper and believe it is likely due to chance https://twitter.com/HelenBranswell/status/122336155449582387...

Re: Wuhan seafood market may not be source of novel virus spreading globally

#95

Post by dekhn » Sat, Feb 01, 2020, 12:05 AM UTC

rococode wrote: post #33

zozbot234 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, https://old.reddit.com/user/BurrShotFirst1804 is claiming that this (preprint, unreviewed) paper is very misleading, speaking as (supposedly) someone highly familiar with at least one of these HIV proteins. Not sure what to make of either the paper itself or this response to it.

Copying /u/BurrShotFirst1804's main response here for easier reference: ===== This study is crap. My comment from another thread. This paper isn't peer reviewed or published. It's just an online journal. I've worked pretty closely with gag in my PhD thesis. Gag is the conglomerate protein that gets cut by the protease to generate the hiv capsid, matrix, and carrier proteins. Gp120 is the receptor protein. This is a r…

A significant part of my postdoc training involved carefully determining what BLAST hits are likely to be true or not. However, I saw some scientists (often bored, or inexperienced) who would set their E-value threshold to 10 (IE, expect 9 false positives for every true positive) and just sort of mine the results until they had some other data that seemed "significant" and published. A lot of science is done this way :(

Re: Wuhan seafood market may not be source of novel virus spreading globally

#96

Post by Aperocky » Sat, Feb 01, 2020, 12:17 AM UTC

erokar wrote: post #93

yurlungur wrote: post #52

The market resides in the heart of the city so it could be that there was some other route of transmission through carriers without symptoms, animals etc. To claim that this came from a lab certain requires more evidence than its mere existence. The whole RNA sequence is available online and so far no expert to my knowledge has claimed it looks synthetic.

Parts of the HIV virus have been identified in it: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.30.927871v1.... "Our analysis of the spike glycoprotein of 2019-nCoV revealed several interesting findings: First, we identified 4 unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV spike glycoprotein that are not present in any other coronavirus reported till date. To our surprise, all the 4 inserts in the 2019-nCoV mapped to It is made…

Can it be the jumped from bat to human happened in an immunocompromised individual with HIV?

Re: Wuhan seafood market may not be source of novel virus spreading globally

#97

Post by randall » Sat, Feb 01, 2020, 12:22 AM UTC

gravelc wrote: post #23

erichocean wrote: post #5

"Uncanny similarity of unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV spike protein to HIV-1 gp120 and Gag" https://biorxiv-cache.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/2020.01.30.... > [ABSTRACT] We are currently witnessing a major epidemic caused by the 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV). The evolution of 2019-nCoV remains elusive. We found 4 insertions in the spike glycoprotein (S) which are unique to the 2019-nCoV and are not present in ot…

This is laughable. Table 1 shows four alignments. The first two are only six contiguous residues, so can easily happen by chance. Three has multiple mistmatches as well as the gap (red). Four has an even larger gap to get the alignment. Take any two viruses and there's a decent likelihood of finding similar alignments.

That makes the first thing sound like treknobabble.

Re: Wuhan seafood market may not be source of novel virus spreading globally

#98

Post by topmonk » Sat, Feb 01, 2020, 12:22 AM UTC

notadoc wrote: post #65

topmonk wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heres another article: https://www.zerohedge.com/health/man-behind-global-coronavir... What also leads me to believe this may be the case is that there was (according to the article) experiments on bats being run, and in China, people often find random animals, in drainage ditches, etc., and then go on to sell them for meat. It's possible that the bats they were working on were improperly disposed of, and then picked…

Zerohedge? Their primary product is fear porn for clicks, how reliable of a source do you think that is?

Nowadays, what source is completely reliable? The best you can do is sample a bunch of them and try to piece together the whole truth from that, because everybody seems to have an angle.

Re: Wuhan seafood market may not be source of novel virus spreading globally

#99

Post by ficklepickle » Sat, Feb 01, 2020, 12:32 AM UTC

WaitWaitWha wrote: post #73

notadoc wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zerohedge? Their primary product is fear porn for clicks, how reliable of a source do you think that is?

Forget the local content, but follow the links and make your decisions with those additional resources - discard them or not. Even a click-bate site can have links that help dis/prove a hypothesis.

Here is an article from CBC[0], the source of the original article that sparked this theory. It claims to debunk the sensational claims, going as far as to call them fake and a conspiracy.

No coronavirus was sent to Wuhan from that lab, it was a henipavirus and Ebola. It also wasn't sent by Dr. Qiu.

That doesn't prove the coronavirus didn't escape from the Wuhan lab. But it does debunk this popular theory that it was Dr Qiu.

Even if it did escape from the lab, it doesn't mean it's a bioweapon. Although the CCP are almost certainly working on them, possibly in their only known level 4 lab in Wuhan. I imagine there is a research overlap between bioweapons and treating people. They both require a deep understanding of how the viruses function.

There is an interesting unanswered question: what is the RCMP investigating Dr. Qiu for? They are very vague. It could be nothing, or it could be related to her helping setup the lab in Wuhan. The RCMP is a vain, inept organization IMO.

[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/china-coronavirus-on...

Re: Wuhan seafood market may not be source of novel virus spreading globally

#100

Post by tgtweak » Sat, Feb 01, 2020, 12:32 AM UTC

jmccorm wrote: post #45

diminish wrote: post #11

> “The virus came into that marketplace before it came out of that marketplace,” Lucey asserts. What's the original source for the "Wuhan seafood market" hypothesis?

Gao Fu, the director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control. I believe this was based on the activities of those first infected along with matching environmental samples at the market. Hope this helps explain the attribution better.

Have they seen this strain among animal populations? It seems logical to establish that animal populations can carry it, and in doing so it should be traceable there.

It seems in the avian flu they had established very early on the lineage of it. It seems very unlikely that they will not be able to identify patient zero.

There was a very far out article on zerohedge (not making any claims as to the legitimacy of the article or the publication) which had some interesting references about recent coronavirus research in facilities outside of China. I wouldn't normally promote it but there are some interesting references in there. https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/did-china-steal-coron...